Hi Martin,
> My pwd is anywhere but /backup and i do:
>
> # tar -C /backup -cf /backup/tmp.tar tmp-*.txt
>
> I then get the following error:
>
> tar: tmp-*.txt: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
> tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
>
> But it works fine if i do any of the following:
>
> # tar -C /backup -cf /backup/tmp.tar tmp-1.txt tmp-2.txt tmp-3.txt
>
> # tar -cf /backup/tmp.tar /backup/tmp-*.txt
>
> # cd /backup
> # tar -cf /backup/tmp.tar tmp-*.txt
>
> # cd /backup
> # tar -C /backup -cf /backup/tmp.tar tmp-*.txt
>
> Is this a bug or just a feature that i am to stupid to figure out how to
> use properly?
You need to understand that the shell expands wildcards and tar gets the
expanded list. That's why your
# cd /backup
# tar -cf /backup/tmp.tar tmp-*.txt
works. The shell can expand tmp-*.txt because they exist in the current
directory. It can expand /backup/tmp-*.txt regardless of the current
directory but then, of course, the expansion looks like
/backup/tmp-1.txt /backup/tmp-2.txt /backup/tmp-3.txt
which you may not want.
Another alternative is
cd /not/backup
tar -C /backup -cf /backup/tmp.tar $(cd /backup && ls tmp-*.txt)
The shell first runs 'cd /backup && ls tmp-*.txt' and replaces the
$(...) with the command's output. It then runs tar.
Cheers,
Ralph.
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